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KNOW
YOUR BUGS
Instead of grabbing a fly and hoping that you’re close, get some inside information by seining a stream before you fish it. First wade out to where fish typically hold. Firmly grasp a small hand seine downstream of your feet on the creek bottom and turn over a dozen or so rocks. Bring up the net and look
closely. Also check the surface flow in the current below if fish are actively feeding around you. You should pick up hatching insects, as well as any terrestrials that have the fish turned on. You don’t need to be an entomologist to figure out what to do with what you seine.
MAYFLY NYMPHS come in many forms depending on the particular species: crawling, swimming, and burrowing. Try to match the general size, color, and profile of the insect.
STONEFLY NYMPHS are oen large and can’t swim, so they crawl from stream booms to dry land or overhangingvegetation to emerge. Match color and size to entice trout.
CADDISFLY NYMPHS have two aquatic life stages. The larva lives in a tiny tube made of twigs and sand. It then seals itself into a case to pupate and grow legs and wing pads.
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Practice AnimalMagnetism
The long, flexible hair from a deer’s tail is widely used in making bucktail jigs as well as streamer flies like the Clouser Deep Minnow. Deer body hair, meanwhile, is shorter, stiffer, and hollow. It can be spun around a hook shank with thread and trimmed to make floating bass bugs. In either case, you can have the satisfaction of catching fish with lures and flies made from your own trophy, if you happen to hunt. Here’s a quick cut to get you there.
CUT AND CURE Start with a fresh deer tail cut at its base from the hide. Slice open the hide to expose the tailbone and remove the bone, starting at the base and working on the underside. Scrape away as much fat and tissue as possible. To get the right deer body hair, cut a few hide pieces about x inches (x cm)in both white (belly) and brown (back or side) shades, and scrape. Coat the scraped hide with salt and allow to cure, which will take a few days.
COLORS TO DYE FOR Aer the hide dries, gently wash bucktail or body-hair patches in lukewarm water, using a standard household detergent. Rinse thoroughly to get rid of grease and grit. Air-dry the hair, unless you plan to dye it, in which case keep it wet while you ready a dye bath. Deer hair is easily colored with common fabric dyes such as Rit or Tintex. Believe it or not, one of the best dyes to use for some colors such as orange or purple is unsweetened Kool-Aid. The most useful color for both flies and jigs is natural white; save at least one tail without dyeing it. For, say, smallmouth bass jigs, you’ll probably want to dye some tails in green, brown, and orange so your jigs will imitate crayfish.
Making a bucktail jig is easy. Clamp a jighead
by the hook bend in a
fly-tying vise or locking pliers. Fasten somefly-tying or polyester sewing thread right behind the jighead. Separate and grab a 1⁄8-inch-diameter ( mm) clump of white bucktail with your thumb and index finger. Cut this clump at the base of the fibers. Hold it next to
the jig—hair tips to the rear—to gauge desired hair length, then trim the bus accordingly. Now hold the clump so bus are just behind the jighead and secure bu ends of the hair fibers to the hook shank with six to eight tight turns of thread to anchor the hairs onto the hook. Continue adding clumps of hair all the way around the jig. Finish with a whip-finish knot or a few half-hitch knots. Finally, coat the thread wraps with some hard-finish nail polish.
JIG YOURBUCK
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D
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TROPHY BUCKTAILS:(A) Bucktail jig;(B) Mickey fin;(C) Frankie Shiner;(D) Hot Lips saltwater jig;
(E) Clouser Minnow
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Make Flies,
Not Bugs
Flies either imitate natural bugs or they aract the aention of fish. A new synthetic called Ice Dub, when wrapped into the body of a fly, does both. Classic nymph paerns like the Hare’s Ear and Prince look just as realistic when they are tied with Ice Dub, yet they also flash and draw eyeballs—especially in low-light conditions—beer than the same paerns tied with natural fur and feathers. In flyfishing, seeing is half of the believing equation for trout, and Ice Dub commands notice beer than anything else.
CATCH A
TROUT’S
ATTENTION
Winter is when many people get serious about tying flies for next spring. Make sure your materials are sealed in plastic bags together with a few moth flakes. Otherwise, dermestid beetle larvae may start chewing and destroying them. (These are the same larvae that taxidermists use to clean animal skulls.) Be especially wary if you borrow or are given a rooster neck or bucktail from someone else, or you might find your entire collection infested.
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The essence of flyfishing f
or
JOIN THE BASS
BUG REVOLUTION
bass is a kind of laid-back antidote to trout fishing’s match-the-hatch intensity. Bass bugs are fanciful rather than factual, full of wanton wiggles as they pop, slide, or slither among the lily pads of summer. Here’s a close look at some of the best.
TOP PICKS Poppers and sliders are both essential patterns for topwater fishing, and new dense foam bodies float better and last longer than older cork versions. Soft silicone-rubber legs, meanwhile, add lifelike movement that drives bass nuts. Cup-face poppers make lots of surface noise when twitched, stirring up lethargic fish. Sliders, on the other hand, make a slow and quiet surface wake when stripped with intermittent pauses. Not all modern bass bugs are high
floating. The Polk’s Dirty Rat swims with only its nose above water when retrieved—just like
